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A Press Junket To Redmond
christian.einfeldt writes "Our very own Roblimo Miller was invited to an all-expenses-paid tour of the Microsoft campus because he is supposedly 'not friendly' to Microsoft. Writes Roblimo: 'I came away with a sense that Microsoft doesn't currently have a clear sense of what Microsoft should be and where Microsoft should be going... I also think, from what I heard during my visit and what other Microsoft employees and customers have told me at other times, that it has degenerated into a series of disconnected fiefdoms that aren't all moving in the same direction.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
"None of the Microsoft people I met had anything to say about their deal with Novell, working with the Open Document Format (ODF), acceptance of the GNU General Public License (GPL) as a legitimate software license, how DRM built into Vista may anger users, or other topics I thought might interest you."
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They're so interested in Linux because they are losing major customers to Linux. I say this as a Microsoft Gold partner in the government sales business - and *MANY* of the deals we go for are now lost to IBM/Linux or Oracle/Linux teams.
Microsoft is friendly to Linux because with SuSE they may be able to win some deals that require Linux - and with close interactions to Linux companies they can tune their FUD campaigns to combat it more effectively.
Also, loyal partners (90% of our sales are on the Microsoft stack) are finding Linux extremely valuable (our prototyping is all done on Linux/Ruby/Rails/Postgresql) - and yes, I've done demos with Microsoft where the server in the sales demo is 100% Linux/Ruby/Rails/Postgresql in a virtual machine. At one point they were even paying us to do the ports of some of our stuff when we said we were having a hard time porting to sql server (some of the extended index types that PostgreSQL has that sql server doesn't).
They see that Linux is important to their customers and partners - and desperately try to understand it.
So why, you may ask, are we such a loyal microsoft partner - we're doing government sales; and their washington sales&marketing (lobbyests?) have been more supportive of us than oracle or IBM have.
First, I'm very biased against Microsoft, primarily for their underhanded business practices in trying to keep their monopoly. That said, I really don't think Microsoft is listening because they really care, they are starting to realize that Open Source is not going away and is really starting to hurt their bottom line. I had to laugh at this whole story because it is typical of Microsoft. When someone is critical of their business, they try to buy good press, be it by lobbying, seriously discounted software or other kickbacks. To me, this is just Microsoft trying to buy some good publicity.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, Open Source advocates don't care about kickbacks, most of them are in it for the true advancement of technology. If Microsoft is really listening, play nicely! I think the biggest thing Microsoft could do to avoid the harsh criticisms from the open source community is to open up your protocols, work with standard groups to develop open standards so everyone can play nicely together.
Well... if I'd pushed Nick and his crowd hard I would have been guilty of the meanness to mid-rank employees I'm being accused of anyway. I saw no point in badgering marketing people who are guilty of nothing but doing their jobs as well as they can. They don't run the company, and their job is to put a positive spin on everything.
What some Slashdot readers seem to have missed (possibly because they read only part of the article, if any of it) is that the negative comments about Microsoft's corporate culture came from Microsoft employees. I said clearly that I asked questions of many "unauthorized" people. I didn't quote any of them by name because I was there to write a story, not to get some poor guy fired for being more open with me than he was supposed to be.
I have never believed that all Microsoft employees are evil. Most of the ones I know personally are decent people. I have seen the company do a lot of bizarre things, and it's still threatening Linux users in an unseemly way, but I don't think Nick White or many of the other 70,000 Microsoft employees are behind any of that or even like it. That kind of behavior comes from top management, which *from what Microsoft employees have told me* may change before long. And almost of the Microsoft people I have talked to "informally" considered Ray Ozzie the most likely successor to Steve Ballmer, and told me they thought he'd be a better boss. I have no idea if any of this is true.
We'll see.
Or, to use the traditional cliche, "only time will tell."
- Robin